M8 Abberation with 2.0/28 Asph

[tilli_willy]

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I'm new in this Forum and it's actually the first forum I participate in. About five weeks ago I bought a M8 with a 2.0/28 Asph. First of all, I'm very happy with the handling of the camera and I shoot totally different pictures than with my digital Canon. Big problems appeared when I shot pictures with higher contrasts. I recognized strong red/magenta auras around the lightest/brightest areas of the pictures. Contacting Leica was after four(!) weeks sucessful with the reply, that even the high quality lenses of Leica have a certain abberation. I'm a professional photographer and I work with a variety of digital systems. None of them has these strong abberations as the Leica lens (I will not compare the Hasselblad system in combination with a Phase One Digital Back, because the quality is far better and the price is ten times higher...). For my taste, the abberations are too strong for a lens which costs approx. Euro 2500.00. Working the file in CS 3 takes me about 45min to retouch this picture properly. But that was not the purpose of buying such an expensive camera........

 

Anybody with similar experieces?

[robsteve]

Are you shooting with a UV-IR filter on the lens?

 

Some of the problems look like what you get with drastic overexposure. It also looks like some IR problems too. That is the reason I asked about the filter.

[35mmSummicron]

in the example of the blown out red lights, you will find that with any camera, any lens.

 

as for the far left crop, you should try either using the chromatic abberations reduction sliders in Adobe Camera Raw, or perhaps using C1 Pro to process the raw files.

 

i find C1 does a fairly good job overall, but i do find that from time to time i will get those nasty colour fringes, and like you i loath having to spend so much time retouching it out in photoshop leica or canon....

 

it seems that 35mm digital is incredibly demanding on the lenses, yet its also the most popular format.....go figure.

[dfarkas]

The M8 might be more prone to this kind of abberation due to the lack of a low-pass/anti-alias filter. I've noticed this effect on both the M8 and the DMR on occasion, but not very often. As Robert mentioned, overexposure does not help the matter. I tend to think that this is more a function of sensor dynamics than lens problems.

 

David

[thompsonkirk]

This isn't a typical chromatic aberration problem that you can fix with the CA sliders, because there's no green counterpart to the red fringing.

[marknorton]

Till, isn't this an example where the centre weighted meter in the Leica just cannot cope? The scene has huge contrast - I don't think I've ever seen a railway station which looks as bright - and visually interesting - as this, they are by nature pretty gloomy places. How cold they be otherwise with the limited lighting?

 

If I had been shooting with my Nikon, I would undoubtedly have used exposure bracketing or switched to spot meter to meter the highlights to stop them blowing. Sadly, the Leica meter is one size fits all, and I like to take a spot meter (Pentax, though the new Gossen looks interesting) along with me. It does increase the payload though.

 

How would you have metered this scene with your ten-times-the-cost Hasselblad?

 

[incidentally, taking a second look at the Gossen Mavo-Spot 2 USB, it's interesting that they are citing examples such as this - tunnels with end illumination - as applications of their meter.]

[Jamie Roberts]

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This kind of fringing does in fact happen with Canon systems too, and it depends on the exposure, the contrast, the lens and the sensor.

 

I don't see it very much on the M8, though one of the first things you do with this camera knowing how much shadow latitude it really has is to underexpose in situations like this (though I have to say the red lights look like they are shot through glass, which could make the abberations worse).

 

The other thing you can do is get an action called "color fringe reducer" which will save you literally hours in PS with any digicam doing this sort of thing. For $10 US it's a steal:

 

Color Fringe Reducer 5.0 - Shay Stephens Photography

[okram]

Just turn on the ALL EDGES CA reduce button in LR or camera raw, and forget about it.

[DavidStone]

This made me look through some shots that I took recently on the M8 with this lens - without the IR filter, which I've not got around to buying. Indoor shots at 1250 ISO, strong daylight through the windows, which are more or less burned out. Not a trace of this phenomenon, neither have I so far seen it on this or any other lens on the M8.

 

Just why there should be a difference, I've no idea.

 

David

 

P.S. I'm using C1 v.4b2 for processing.

[carstenw]

I do see this from time to time, but only usually in extreme conditions, and much less than my 5D. I don't worry, since usually it is treatable and not all that visible in final images. In very high-contrast images like this Hamburg Trainstation shot, it might need more work.

 

It looks like sensor blooming, not CA, since there is only one colour there, ie. the sensor charge overflows between pixels, I think.